Alex Kurtagić’s Mister

838 words

Alex Kurtagić
Mister
Guildford, U.K.: Iron Sky Publishing, 2009

Gosh, I sure would have enjoyed being present when this book came under the eye of a generic editor at one of the generic American or British publishers, assuming Alex Kurtagić had been innocent enough to submit it. No, I don’t claim such an editor would actually have fainted, or been stricken suddenly by one of the new diseases, not at all. No, what I seem to see (speaking solely out of my own imagination), is a certain pallor coming over the face of said reader, a look of confusion or even distress. An impatient snap of her head, as if she were tossing a stray wisp of hair — there was no such wisp — a stray wisp, as I was saying, out of her eyes. I have seen bald-headed feminists make the same haughty gesture.

In fact, Kurtagić’s book may be the best modern example of an effort to display in fiction the fashionable imbecilities of the putrefying West. He sees, correctly I think, the ideology of universal equality as the most deadly of all our current trends, one that might actually eventuate in the collapse of the best thing that ever happened, namely the Western Civilization that began 3,500 years ago with the Mycenaeans. He knows, this author, that inequality, the recognition that some things are better than other, is the prerequisite of culture and of a life worth living. And understands that even if all demographics were equal, LOL, still it is vital to preserve the racial peculiarities that would be lost through homogenization. And that those who look forward to an undifferentiated global population are the most dangerous people ever to have threatened our species.

He understands, Kurtagić, that men and women are, thank heavens, different from each other, and that those perverted people who wish to delete those differences need to be put in the same list with the above-mentioned enemies of life. That a female careerist — one who puts ambition above all else — can’t really be considered a woman at all. And in short that modern-day progressives are mostly characterized by their hatred of accomplishment and good health and their adoration of the abnormal.

Understands that the historic achievements of Western Civilization are NOT indicators of evil. Seems to disagree that the only immoral actions are those that might hurt a person’s feelings. Appears to believe that education is necessarily elitist, and ought not be given in inverse proportion to a person’s abilities.

I could go on. He understands, Kurtagić, that simply because some tribe or another has fared poorly in history, that does not necessarily mean that they are especially fine human beings. It might mean the opposite!

Sorry.

He realizes that standards, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic, are not simply social constructs devised to derogate those who have opted to do without them. (After all, could anything be more incorrect than to prefer Wagner to rap?) Understands, Kurtagić, that societies that have turned away from supernal values have no grounds for any values at all. That anyone who still stubbornly cleaves to traditional values is going to have a hard time finding employment, and may likely end up writing novels. Or that some people have the uncanny (and unfair) ability to be more than just another grain of sand.

He believes (to continue with this), that English words are interesting, even beautiful in some cases, and that an accomplished individual has no good reason to restrict himself to 17,000 words, or herself to just 1,500 in a language that contains a million. That threatened words are just as much in trouble as threatened species.

Understands, this man, that compassion is an insult to its victims, and that those who dole it out would never wish to have it applied to themselves. That compassion instantaneously places the grantor in a superior position, as well as generating a good deal of self-satisfaction. That compassion can be carried out more or less effortlessly while sitting in a darkened room with a cocktail in one hand.

Want to terrify someone? Fetch that person into police headquarters and subject him to an extended interrogation with undefined penalties in store. In Kurtagić’s book, it appears that the interrogators are familiar with Kafka’s Trial, in which the prisoner is not allowed to know what he is being charged with. Or maybe they are familiar with the interrogation scenes in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov is led step by step to impugn himself by means of his own intellectual conceit. Or perhaps they have followed the interrogation in Darkness at Noon, in which the prisoner is at last persuaded by his tireless Stalinist interrogator of having impure motives when he believed he was acting on behalf of The Party, a fault that carries the death penalty. The protagonist in Mister is subjected to all these tactics, but to the profit of modern literature survives them all. Very fortunate was he not to have come under the hostile attention of a novelist of genius.